You know, my boy, he said, it's impossible to love men such as they are. And yet we must. So try to do good to men by doing violence to your feelings, holding your nose, and shutting your eyes, especially shutting your eyes. Endure their villainy without anger, as much as possible; try to remember that you're a man too. For, if you're even a little above average intelligence, you'll have the propensity to judge people severely. Men are vile by nature and they'd rather love out of fear. Don't give in to such love: despise it always.

By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.

It is easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.

To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.

Sorrow compressed my heart, and I felt I would die, and then... Well, then I woke up.

I utter what you would not dare think

He who desires to see the living God face-to-face should not seek him in the empty, firmament of his mind, but in human love.